I have had very little sympathy with the curiosity of the world about my domestic relations.

Leigh Fought, Ph.D, is a visiting professor of history at Le Moyne College. She was an editor of the first volume of "Frederick Douglass’s Correspondence" and her book "Frederick Douglass’s Women" will be published by Oxford University Press within the year.

By Leigh Fought, Le Moyne College

Over a century ago, one of Central New York’s most famous African-American civil rights advocates entered into what many considered an unholy union. On Jan. 24, 1884, 60-year old Frederick Douglass and 46-year-old Helen Pitts defied the expectations of their families and Washington society by joining in interracial matrimony.

Neither black nor white communities offered many congratulations.

The Washington Grit called the marriage “a national calamity” and “the mistake of his life.” Others considered his choice to be that of a dotty, old man who had rejected his race. The groom’s children never hid their disdain for his new wife, believing the marriage betrayed their late mother, Anna, who was black. His daughter-in-law even sued him. The bride’s sisters and mothers embraced her new husband, but her father and uncle never accepted that a black man they once admired had joined the family. One of her old classmates at Mt. Holyoke simply exclaimed, “How could she?”

True friends, on the other hand, noted that the marriage was not only one of affection but also one that emerged from their principles. Another old classmate insisted that Helen “was true to her convictions to the last,” while a reporter for the Indianapolis Leader pointed out, “Mr. Douglass has simply put into practice the theories of his life.” Douglass himself demanded, “What business has the world with the color of my wife?”

Marriage or sex between people of different races hovered on the edges of civil rights debates during the 19th Century. Abolitionists petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to overturn prohibitions against marriages between blacks and whites throughout the 1830s. On May 18,1838, in the City of Brotherly Love, false rumors of an interracial marriage between abolitionists Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimke’ (both were white) stoked the fury of rioting anti-abolitionists who burned down the meeting hall of an antislavery convention.

By the time the Douglasses took their own vows, a constitutional amendment banning interracial marriage had been proposed and lynch mobs styled themselves defenders of racial purity and separation, torturing and murdering black men for alleged sexual relations with white women.

The Douglasses’ friend, journalist Ida B. Wells, took up the campaign against the terrorism, and Helen herself spoke out against lynching in her widowhood. By 1967, when the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia struck down all prohibitions of interracial relationships, only nine states could claim never to have had such laws. New York, now at the forefront of recognizing same-sex marriage, was one of the nine.

Douglass was no stranger to the wrath incurred by his association with white women. In 1849, while police looked on, he suffered a beating at the hands of ruffians on Broadway while on an evening stroll with two Englishwomen, Julia and Eliza Griffiths. As the trio sailed through Upstate New York, riverboat staff refused them seating in dining rooms. In Rochester, supporters who characterized their public appearances together as “antislavery work” remarked that their private friendships offended polite society. Even William Lloyd Garrison, during an acrimonious dispute among abolitionists, raised the spectre of Douglass “slumbering in the lap” of “Jezebel” Julia. By the time of his marriage to Helen Pitts, a lifetime of intrusion left him to write wearily to his Rochester friend, Amy Post, “I have had very little sympathy with the curiosity of the world about my domestic relations.”

Douglass detested the hypocrisy that produced segregation and inequality. Himself the product of mixed-parentage, he deplored those who would limit his choice of partner to only one race and quipped that his marriage to a black woman would be just as interracial as to a white woman. Full integration, he believed, was the only path to justice. Integration should include not only the acceptance and legal protection of freedom, citizenship, and equal access to education and public facilities, but also of the most intimate and private relationships in life.

In his second inaugural address, President Barak Obama assured the nation that equality “is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma and Stonewall.” In referencing the protest that sparked the gay rights movement, inviting gay poet Richard Blanco to read, and in replacing the anti-gay Louis Giglio with Civil Rights icon Myrlie Evers, the president symbolically demonstrated his growing support of gay rights.

That this president would be the first to take this path is particularly fitting because he is both a product of the civil rights movement to which he connects LGBTQ rights and because he is the child of an interracial marriage.

Today, critics consider gay marriage an abomination and seek legal backing for their position. For most of American history, however, interracial marriage was forbidden as unnatural.

“For if we are truly created equal,” Obama continued in his speech, “then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”